Authors: Regina Morris
Ben shook his head. “She’s probably aged a few decades past sixty by now. I’m guessing late eighties.”
Raymond agreed. He also knew how much his sister hated aging and didn’t want her to suffer any more than she had. Raymond asked Alex to pass out the vials of cord blood she had retrieved from the lab. There were six total.
“The cord blood goes with each of you,” Raymond said. “Do not consume the baby blood until we arrive at our destination.”
The team stared at one another. “We have to use this blood,” Raymond said. “Our enemy is consuming it. They will be stronger and faster because of it. We need to level the playing field.”
“Julian here wasn’t any stronger,” Ben retorted.
Raymond smirked at Julian all tied up and now quiet. “Julian’s been a pawn his entire life. I doubt his family gave him any of the good stuff.” Raymond didn’t need his special abilities for this one. Judging by Julian’s furrowed brow and his look of deep thought, Raymond had guessed right.
“Our first priority is to save Sulie,” Raymond said. “Priority two is to kill that bitch Trudy, and anyone else who has had a hand in all of this.”
As Sterling parked the car a safe distance from the restaurant, tensions remained high. No one wanted to guess how old Sulie might be if she had been injured, and no one raised the question as to whether it was too late or not to save her.
Sulie lay on the bed and took stock of her situation. Dixon was captured. He was hurt and bleeding, and he already had anemia. She was on lockdown and aging. How could she save him? The video Charles had shown her of Dixon could have been recorded anywhere. It would be stupid to assume Dixon was being held anywhere near her prison, but she still allowed her mind to entertain the idea. If she could escape Charles, she may be able to find Dixon. Of course, if she killed Charles, she may take away the only person who knew where Dixon was being held.
So. Save Dixon, then kill Charles.
She didn’t care about the order, just as long as both got done.
And she didn’t want to forget that bitch Trudy. How dare she brutally feed from Dixon’s neck? Sulie closed her eyes and told herself not to cry. Crying would not solve anything. Killing Trudy by violent means… that was what was called for.
Sulie had to focus. She still had her makeshift weapons. If she could only get the door unlocked, she could kill Charles and escape. Of course, she would need his thumbprint for the more modern biolock, so maybe not kill Charles, just lock him in this cell and sever his hand. Make him suffer just as she was forced to do so.
The click of the outer lock pulled her from her delightful visions. There had been no glass of blood in a while. Perhaps this was her guardian making another donation. Her body ached, and she felt frail. She needed to feed.
The heavy footsteps told her the visitor wore boots, not Italian sling–backs. She counted off the steps. All hope of another glass of blood was dashed when Charles came into view.
“Baby doll,” he said. His lustful, blackened eyes traveled down her body. “Good news. The Vampire Council granted our marriage.”
The words cut deeply into her heart. She was now his wife. Sulie held her breath. Everything took so much time to get done in this modern world. Everything — even installing cable television takes hours, if not days, for an appointment. How the hell did the marriage get approved in such a short time? She wasn’t sure she believed him, so she eyed him questioningly.
“It helps to have friends and relatives on the Council.”
Sulie watched as he pressed his thumb to the panel and opened the lock. She needed that thumb. Of course, first she needed a sharp blade, but had nothing of the sort. Knowing she had to bide her time, she didn’t bother to rush the door to tear out his throat. Just as long as Dixon survived, it didn’t matter what happened to her.
Charles slowly approached her and she realized he had a leather bag with him. Thinking it wasn’t a good sign, she stood up from the bed and walked cautiously to the back wall where two stakes were hidden. She felt her fangs lengthen and knew her eyes had blackened in preparation for a fight.
“You will do as I say, dear wife, or I will have your Johnny killed.” He tilted his head back to the bed. “Lay down.”
Deflated, she took a deep breath and walked back to the bed, never taking her eyes off of him. She watched as he took a pair of gloves out of the bag and put them on. Next out of the bag came chains that she figured were, at the minimum, silver plated.
Sulie sat further back on the bed. She didn’t smell any blood from the bag, so she assumed there was to be no dinner and a movie first.
“Hands,” he ordered. “Put your hands up to the corners at the head of the bed. Your feet to the bottom corners.”
Sulie stared at him. She knew she had been in worse spots than this. Unfortunately, she couldn’t think of any right now. Her heart raced with fear and she knew he could hear it. She didn’t want to give him the satisfaction of knowing how scared she felt, so she lifted her chin defiantly. “What? No honeymoon?”
Charles let out a chuckle. “Once you’re at your base Jahrling age, we’ll only need a few minutes, baby doll.”
Her stomach turned. She couldn’t allow him to tie her up. That was hostage 101 training. Negotiate. Reason. Have the captor see you as a person. She looked up at him with the saddest puppy eyes she could muster. “I am hungry, Charles. So how about dinner first? We could talk and catch up.”
He grabbed one of her hands and shackled it. “There will be nothing to eat until you are secure.” The silver singed her skin until he adjusted her sleeve under it. “Don’t need you aging any more. Looks like you only have a c
ouple of years left right now.”
She knew her time was limited. He didn’t need to remind her how old she had become.
Her arm was forced upward as he strung the chain behind the headboard and collected her other hand to fasten. Her shoulders ached, but at least she would have blood soon. She could live through the humiliation of being raped; she could escape before any baby was born. She had to.
When he moved to her legs, she kicked at his arms. All her actions did was cause him to twist her ankles once he had snared them. Pain ripped through her body and she medically read her condition. Twisted left foot, broken big toe on the right foot, arthritis in her shoulders, 30% muscle loss in her body, fading vision… she decided to stop there. The list seemed too long.
It seemed useless to continue the fight. Nothing could come of it in her aged condition. Within moments, her legs were chained too.
Once she was secured, Charles walked to the small table in the corner of the room and placed the key out of reach. Sulie then noticed Charles looked down at his watch.
“Where’s the blood?” Sulie asked as she felt her time slipping away.
He moved towards her. “You’re in for a treat. Cord blood.”
She licked her lips, her tongue brushing up against her fangs. She didn’t care if it was cord blood or not, just so she’d have it soon. “You store cord blood here?” she asked, looking out the cell door.
“Some, but it never stays here for long. I’m waiting for a fresh shipment to be delivered,” he said as he pulled out his phone. “Trudy will go over the details with you later. We keep most of the blood in warehouses.” He held the phone up and moved around the room. His frustration grew as he walked closer to the barred windows and still didn’t have reception.
“No bars?” Sulie joked. “Who are you calling?”
“Thanks to our business here, Julian is now doing collections. He should have been back with another supply of blood by now.” Charles gritted his teeth as he stared at his phone. “No reception, no messages,” he snapped. “Julian is more useless than Millard was!” He stormed out the cell and locked the door behind him. Sulie heard him as he walked to an outer door opposite of where he had entered. She didn’t even know another door existed at the other end of the hallway. By the sound of the door clicking shut, it too locked when closed.
Evidently the phone worked better out of the cellar. She could hear Charles screaming into the phone asking for updates from Julian. But soon his voice faded as he moved out of earshot.
Now alone, chained, starved, and broken… Sulie cried.
In one hand Dixon held his dagger, and in the other the syringe of death from his old desk at the White House. He slowly made his way toward the doors separating the dining room from the kitchen and peered through the tiny circular window. He saw no vampires in the empty kitchen, but that also meant no Sulie either. He pushed open the door and stepped in, cautious to make as little noise as possible.
Gas pipes stuck out of the walls and floors of the vacant room where the stoves and ovens had once been. No cabinet doors remained. The whole place appeared gutted. Stains marred the white walls as if a kitchen fire had once taken place, which led Dixon to believe the place probably closed down for reasons other than just financial bad times.
Five doors existed in the kitchen. One he had just entered through, another led outside, a third opened into a pantry, the fourth to a freezer unit, and one mystery door led somewhere else. The lock on the freezer unit was broken. He opened the door and found the freezer unit to be empty. The pantry door stood open, so he peered inside. Empty. That just left the mystery door.
Naturally, the door was locked, with no key in sight. He had broken the bobby pins on the last locked door, so he needed another solution. Searching the room, he found a few wires sticking out of a countertop, probably from a now missing heat lamp. He pulled on the wires and found them rigid enough to use as a lock pick. Moments later he was through the door.
Stairs led down, and the place was dark. He cursed under his breath about vampire eyesight and his own, which was failing in his old age. He held onto the railing as he descended down the stairs. The place smelled dusty and he fought the urge to sneeze.
Once at the bottom of the steps, he found another door. It had metal bars and a keypad entry system. Compared to the rest of the hallway, from what he could make out in the bad light, this lock appeared to be state of the art. With the small amount of light shining down from the top of the stairway, Dixon used his dagger to pry open the control panel. He recognized the makers of the lock, and if he remembered his training correctly, he could break through. Dixon found the green and blue wires, stripped them with the dagger, and pinched the exposed metal together. At the same time, he punched in a default code into the pad, which for this brand, was 0000. After a series of three clicks, the door opened and he walked through.
Dixon left the door ajar, thankful for his hobby of reading technical journals.
He was slowly losing his light source from the top of the stairs, but fortunately another light source was farther down the hallway. The light seemed brighter, and he figured it came from a window. Approaching slowly, he found another metal door where the light shown through.
The first thing that caught his eye was the door’s lock. Biometric and state of the art. It would take more than a default code and wire tricks to get through this one.
A moan told him someone was in the room. He crouched down, just to the left of the door and peered through the bars. His eyes zeroed in on one thing and one thing only. Sulie.
*******
The turn of the lock of the outer gate echoed through the room and stirred Sulie from her private crying. Tears dripped down her cheeks and she tasted their saltiness as she licked her lips in anticipation of the blood she smelled.
But more than just blood filled the air. She sniffed again. The scent of human sweat also lingered in the stale air. She listened to the footsteps and knew only one person approached. A human. The footsteps sounded soft and calculating.
Sulie knew it took exactly eight footsteps from the outer gate to the interior one before she could see her visitor. She had counted off four of the eight by the time she turned her head to see who approached.
As she counted off the last two steps, she took a deep breath to prepare herself. She felt her heart stop as the visitor came into view. On the opposite side of her cell, behind the blasted silver bars, was Dixon. The love of her life stood a short distance from her. She looked at the man, not believing it was him.
She wanted to cry out his name, but only managed to cry out a moan in her elation and to smile at him. He was here to rescue her, but she knew he’d likely die in the process.
*******
Through the bars, Dixon watched Sulie as she lay on the bed. She stared at him, and he noticed a smile appear on her face. Her smile stretched her facial muscles and accentuated the multitude of wrinkles she now had. She was older than he had ever seen her. Her hair had grown white and her face had aged, but the twinkle in those eyes as she saw him was pure Sulie. His heart skipped a beat. Dixon had never been happier to see anyone in his life, and he smiled back at her.
In his excitement, he yelled her name and stretched his arm through the bars in a useless effort to touch her, even though he could tell she was chained and a good fifteen feet from him. “I’ll get you out. Just hold on.” He tested the door and it didn’t budge. Worse yet, Dixon wasn’t familiar with the lock’s make and model. What he wouldn’t give to text William the make and model number of this unit so he could look it up on a secure government site and suggest a way through it.
He noticed Sulie lift her head. He wasn’t the best at guessing people’s ages, but assumed she was in her mid–nineties. Her lips looked dry and he heard her weakly say his name. To Dixon, she remained radiantly gorgeous, timelessly beautiful. He had found her in time.
He glanced around the sparse hallway. There wasn’t much here to help him get through the locked door. He tested the floorboards by stomping his foot. They felt and sounded solid beneath him. As he considered the barred window, he saw Sulie tilt her head.
In a frightened voice, she said, “He’s coming back.”